One True Loves (10 page)

I got down off the roof and searched through Jesse's things. I ransacked his closet, dresser, and desk before I found them.

Binoculars.

I got back up on the roof and I stood right where I could see the sliver of sea. I waited.

I was not enjoying the view. I was not relishing the peace and quiet. I was not reveling in my solitude.

I was looking for Jesse.

I saw waves cresting onto the shore. I saw a boat. I saw people under umbrellas, lying on towels, as if there wasn't important work to be done.

I heard my dad and sister enter the house and start looking around for me. I heard, “Emma?” coming from them in every room of the house. I recognized the worry as it grew in their voices, as each time they said my name they were met with
more silence. Soon, my mom came home and her voice joined the chorus.

But I couldn't respond. I had to stand there and watch for Jesse. It was my duty, as his wife. I had to be the first to spot him when he made landfall.

When I noticed someone coming up to the roof, I assumed it was my dad and I thought,
Good, he can look, too.

But it was Marie.

She stood there, looking at me, as I held the binoculars up to my face and stared at the ocean.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“What are you doing?” she said as she started walking toward me.

“I'm going to find him.”

I felt Marie put her arm around my shoulder. “You can't . . . that won't . . . work,” she said.

“I have to be looking for him. I can't give up on him.”

“Em, give me the binoculars.”

I wanted to ignore her, but I needed to explain my logic. “Jesse could come back. We have to be watching.”

“He isn't coming back.”

“You don't know that.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“You just can't stand that I'm no longer in your shadow,” I said to her. “Because it means you aren't the center of the world anymore. Jesse is coming back, Marie. And I am going to sit here and wait until he does. Because I know my husband. I know how incredible he is. And I'm not going to allow you to make me feel like he's anything less just because you like it better when I feel small.”

Marie reared her head back, as though I'd struck her.

“I have to stay here and watch for him. It's my job. As his wife.”

When I saw the look on my sister's face in that moment, a mixture of compassion and fear, I realized that she thought I was crazy.

For a moment, I wondered,
Oh, my God. Am I crazy?

“Emma, I'm so sorry,” she said as she put her arms around me and held me the way a mother holds a child, as if we were of the same body. I was not used to that type of sister, the type of sister that is also a friend. I was used to having
just
a sister, the way some of your teachers are just teachers and some of your coworkers are just coworkers. “Jesse is dead,” she told me. “He's not out there somewhere trying to come home. He's gone. Forever. I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry.”

For a moment, I wondered,
What if she's right?

“He's not dead,” I said, my voice wavering and rocky. “He's out there.”

“He's not out there,” she said. “He's dead.”

For a moment, I wondered,
Is that possible?

And then the truth washed over me like a flood.

I sobbed so hard for so long that every day I would wake up with my eyes swollen shut. I didn't get dressed for three weeks.

I cried for him, and for what I'd lost, and for every day left of my life that I had left to live without him.

My mom had to force me to bathe. She stood in the shower with me, holding my naked body up to the water, carrying my entire weight in her arms because I wouldn't stand up on my own.

The world seemed so dark and bleak and meaningless. Life seemed so pointless, so cruel.

I thought of how Jesse took care of me and how he held me. I thought of how he felt when he ran his hands down my back, how his breath smelled sweet and human.

I lost hope and love and all of my kindness.

I told my mom that I wanted to die.

I said it even though I knew it would hurt her to hear it. I had to say it because of how much it hurt to feel it.

She winced and closed her eyes and then she said, “I know. But you can't. You have to live. You have to find a way to live.”

Six weeks after I left Jesse at the airport, I came out of my bedroom, walked into the kitchen where my parents were talking, and I said, with a calmness and clarity of purpose that I had been lacking for weeks, “I want to go back to Acton. I don't want to stay here anymore.”

My father nodded and my mom said, “Whatever you need.”

I do not remember who packed up my things, who sold my car and my furniture. I do not remember getting on the plane. All I know is that, a week later, I landed at Logan Airport.

Home.

Emma and Sam

Or, how to put yourself back together

W
hen you lose someone you love, it's hard to imagine that you'll ever feel better. That, one day, you'll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order.

But it does happen.

If you're patient and you work at it.

It starts just by breathing in the Massachusetts air again. Your soul recharges ever so slightly when you see brick walkways and brownstones in Boston, when you pull into your parents' driveway and move back into your old bedroom.

Your emotional fortitude grows stronger as you sleep in your childhood bed and eat your mother's pancakes for breakfast and hide from most of the world.

You spend all of your time watching the Travel Channel and you get so bored of it that you pick up a novel from the stack of books in your bedroom, the books that your parents have given you over the years that you refused to crack open until now.

You read all the way through to the end of one, only to find out that the husband dies. You hurl the book across the room, breaking the bedside lamp. When your mom comes home that night, you tell her what happened. You ask her for books to read where no one dies.

Two days later, you find both of your parents in the living
room with a pile of novels on the coffee table. They are skimming through them one by one, making sure every character lives to the end. That night, you have a new stack of books to read and you open up the first one, confident it won't break you down.

It is the first time in a long time that you have felt safe.

Marie finds out that she is having identical twin girls. You want to buy her a pair of matching onesies but you don't want to leave the house. You order them online to have them sent to her. When the site asks you for a gift message, you know that you should congratulate her and use a lot of exclamation points but you don't have it in you. You can't summon up enthusiasm, can't even bring yourself to type it. Instead, you type, “For my little baby nieces.”

Your mom comes home with a new bedside lamp for you, made just for reading. It shoots up from the base and then hangs over your head, hovering just above the pages. You read three books from the stack that week, by the light through the window during the day and the lamplight hovering above you at night.

Your nieces are born. They are named Sophie and Ava. You hold them. They are beautiful. You wonder how it's possible Marie got everything she ever wanted and you . . . ended up here. You know this is called self-pity. You don't care.

Olive flies in from Chicago to see you. Everyone assumes she will stay at her parents' place but you feel immense relief when she says she'd rather make up a bed on the floor of your room. She doesn't ask how you are because she knows there's no answer. Instead, she tells you that she's thinking of giving up caffeine and makes you help her Facebook-stalk the man she just began seeing. You feel less alone when she's there, which is a welcome reprieve from the crushing loneliness you feel
almost all the time. When she packs up to go back to Chicago, you joke about going with her, fitting in the overhead compartment. Olive says, “You probably can't see it just yet, but this place is good for you.”

One day, the memories that haunt every section of your town and your house, the memories of where you and Jesse met and fell in love as teenagers, feel contained and manageable. So you venture outside.

You head to your family's bookstore.

You realize you aren't ready for a full day out of the house when you break down next to the Shel Silverstein collection Marie put up in the back corner.

You don't even know why you're breaking down. Nothing about Shel Silverstein reminds you of Jesse. Except that Shel Silverstein wrote about what it meant to be alive and you feel like you aren't alive anymore. Because Jesse isn't. You feel like you stopped living when he went missing. You feel like the rest of your days are killing time until it's time to die.

You know the only thing you can do is get in the passenger's seat of your dad's car and allow him to drive you back home and put you to bed.

But then you feel yourself growing stronger in that bed, as if you're squeezing the tears out of yourself, wringing yourself dry of pain. You imagine yourself bleeding grief, as if the water from your eyes is the pain itself. You imagine it leaving your body and being soaked up by the mattress.

You wake up one morning feeling dry and completely empty, so empty that if someone knocked on you, you'd sound hollow.

Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you're used to being full of joy. But it's not so bad when you're used to feeling full of pain.

Hollow feels okay.

Empty feels like a beginning.

Which is nice, because for so long you have felt like you were at the end.

You ask your parents for a new bed. You feel childish doing it. But you don't have any money because you have not pitched a story in a very long time and you quit working at the blog.

Your parents don't understand why you're asking and you can't quite explain it to them. You just say, “This one is tainted.” But what you mean is that you feel like it absorbed your suffering. You know it sounds crazy but you believe your pain is in the mattress and you don't want to absorb it back into your own body.

You know it's not that simple. But it feels like it is.

Two weeks later, you have a new mattress and box spring. You watch your dad tie the old ones to a friend's truck. You watch him drive down the street headed for the dump.

You feel better. Freer.

You realize this is called superstition.

You're OK with that.

You know that you will never truly be free of the grief. You know that it is something you must learn to live with, something you manage.

You start to understand that grief is chronic. That it's more about remission and relapse than it is about a cure. What that means to you is that you can't simply wait for it to be over. You have to move through it, like swimming in an undertow.

Toward the end of Marie's maternity leave, your parents come down with food poisoning. There is no one to open the store. You offer to do it. They tell you that you don't have to.
They say they can ask one of the sales clerks. You tell them you've got it under control.

When they say thank you, you realize that you have missed being relied upon. You remember the pride of being useful.

You wake up early and you take a shower and you get in the car. When you put the key in the door of the bookstore, you realize that Jesse is gone but maybe your life is still here. Maybe you can do something with it.

Three days before Marie is supposed to return to the store, she tells your parents that she doesn't want to come back to work. She has tears in her eyes. She says she's sorry that she's disappointing them but she just wants to stay at home with her babies. She says she can't imagine spending her days away from them. Your parents are caught off guard. They quickly become supportive.

That night, you overhear them talking about it. You hear your mother console your father, you hear her tell him that the store doesn't have to go to you or Marie. She says it's going to be fine.

The next day, they start looking for a new store manager.

You know what you need to do.

You sit them down at the kitchen table that night and you ask for the job. When they ask if you're sure that's what you want to do, you say you are but the truth is somewhere in the gray area between yes and no.

Surprised but pleased, your parents agree, saying nothing would make them prouder.

Now, you have a job.

And then, slowly, day by day, minute by minute, at such a snail's pace that you can barely register that anything is happening at all, you find a life's purpose again.

It is right there, in Blair Books, the very place you've spent your life running from. It is in the children's reading nook and the messy stockroom. It is in the curated display table at the front of the store and the bargain bin in the back. You look at the bookmarks. The ones that say “Travel the World by Reading a Book.”